Obama's water boarding has begun and before it ends he could be drowning in charges most of which, I believe, might eventually prove plausible.
The effect is hard to tell since most black voters will call accusations of alleged scandals racially motivated.
Hispanic voters might feel otherwise because they do not have the same blind allegiance as black Americans and will not feel the charges are necessarily against them.
Finally, most white voters, who still remain enthralled with Obama, will probably circle the wagons and try and defend him in a variety of ways because they cannot bring themselves to be objective and to look themselves in the mirror and admit they were duped and suckered. The key to Obama's current future lies with the media and press and though they now smell blood they are not likely to jeopardize their access or deny themselves of their leg tingles.
History will show Obama to be what I have believed all along - a tragic, incompetent and a lying mistake.
---
Now for an attempt at reviewing: " The Five Thousand Year Leap - Twenty-Eight Great Ideas That Are Changing the World" by W. Cleon Skousen (June 1981)
Why is a book published in 1981 being reviewed now? Why did the New York Times decide to try to trash the ideas in the book and the author himself? Why was the book reissued and then became a national bestseller under the new name: The 5,000 Year Leap – Principles of Freedom - A Miracle that Changed the World?
W. Cleon Skousen was a popular author, speaker and teacher across North America, and in more than 60 countries worldwide. He was a student of history and a scholar of law, specializing in the principles of Freedom, The U.S. Constitution, economics, and ancient history and scriptures. He was invited to write a new constitution for Canada and the proposed United States of Latin America, and he published a model constitution that could be adopted by nations everywhere.
He served 16 years in the FBI, four years as Chief of Police in Salt Lake City, and ten years as a university professor. He was a prolific writer and produced three national best sellers, The Naked Communist, The Naked Capitalist, and The Five Thousand Year Leap. Eight of his books were used as college texts, and several were translated and published in other countries.
He was admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia and before the District Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.
His seminars on the Constitution have been taught to millions across the U.S. Among his students were dozens of U.S. Senators and Representatives, two Supreme Court justices, and several candidates for President.
He believed knowledge and understanding were key to maintaining a free country, and spent his entire adult life opening up complex issues for deeper understanding by students and audiences all around the world.
And so it is obvious why the NY Times had to try to diminish his ideas that were re-publicised by Glenn Beck, who attributed much of his own re-enlightenment to this text originally published in 1981. The re-emergence of Skousen’s work and support by Tea Party advocates then made it a national bestseller.
The NY Times naturally found Skousen’s return to the Constitution’s founding principles particularly troubling. So they proceeded to write scathing criticisms of Skousen as a far right extremist, and even tried to bring in his Mormon faith as evidence he was out of the mainstream.
Yet his credentials obviously belie those NY Times criticisms and, typical of liberal thinking which, when it cannot rebut the content, resort to personal attacks.
What the NY Times can’t stand is the public's better understanding of what made this country the success that it has become.
And what they can’t abide is anyone questioning the new direction liberals want to take us in, using made up concepts of “fairness” and “equal outcomes” to expand the power of the federal government to run people’s lives.
So for the readers of this review to begin to understand what is at stake, here are the 28 principles that Skousen perceived America’s founding fathers energized. These were what the author believed were so different from prior centuries’ and millennial political wisdom as to how a society should be governed. (See 1 below.)
In (1a below) we have an up date of the various alleged scandals as a basis of comparison with Skousen's principles.
---
Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) The author begins with an introduction about the settlement at Jamestown, and that represented a new beginning for man kind culminating in our Constitution and Republic. Jamestown was different because communal economics was tried by these European immigrants but they found out they were worse than Plato described. Consequently they began to develop a system of free enterprise principles which were later defined and refined in Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations."
Skousen uses the rest of this marvelous treatise to list and discuss the 28 great ideas that have/are changed/changing the world and urges we return to the basics if we are to retain our Republic, for whenever we stray from their message we run afoul of natural law and God's intent. Structuring a Government with all the Power in the People: What a novel concept.
The intent was to govern in the center by people's law and avoid Ruler's Law (Tyranny) and No Law (Anarchy.)
Our founders noted the similarities between Anglo-Saxon Common Law and the People's Law of Ancient Israel. The genius of our Founders was they devised a three headed eagle connected by one neck. The three branches were endowed with separate powers but each was co-ordinated with the other and could not function independently of the other. The Executive Branch was deemed the problem solving one while the Judicial was deemed the conservation wing, ie protecting the nation's resources and the people's freedom.
This is why the recent revelations of Obama's IRS machinations is so disturbing, disheartening and totally foreign to what our Founders intended.
Principles:
1. The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law.
Because man is endowed with the gift of reason and a soul it was deemed that man should adhere to God's law or virtue and all of laws should be measured against God's Law. Examples would be unalienable rights, duties and responsibilities, Habeas Corpus, limited government, checks and balances, no taxation without representation etc. Why? Because a free man was a productive man as proven by our Republic's great contributions to man kind.
2.A free people cannot survive under a Republican Constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong.
Skousen discusses how to retain the essential ingredient for man's freedom "virtue," in the 3rd principle. 3. The most promising method of securing a virtuous and morally stable people is to elect virtuous leaders. Once again reflect upon the current president, how he has conducted himself, his appointments and their actions and, again, any thinking, caring person has to be dispirited.
The Founders spoke often about making public service an honor rather than a means to a profit which has become so commonplace in today's D.C. Move to Washington, work your way up the ladder and never leave as you gain more and more power and more and more wealth. Ben Franklin 'foresaw the possibility that profit in public office could become the means by which an American monarchy could eventually be established.' How sad indeed as it is coming to pass. Politics has proven to be the road to fortunes for so many.
4.Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained.
de Toqueville discovered the importance of religion when he came to America and considered it the glue to our uniqueness and greatness. Franklin believed a Creator existed and mankind should recognize and worship this. He further believed the Creator revealed a moral code of behaviour, that mankind was responsible for the way his behaviour was used to treat his fellow person.
These tenets are found throughout the Founder's writings and the remarkable thing they did was their campaign for equality of all religions. Even atheists were allowed to believe as they wish. As Americans becomes progressive and less inclined toward religion, less moral, less caring about those who adhere to a religious and moral code and orientation we again cannot help but be drawn back to the consequences and revelations of Benghazi, the IRS, the AP affair.
No effort made to save fellow citizens, attacks on citizens who are of a different mind set and attacks on a free press to stultify probing of government. Religious principles under-gird good government.
5. A restatement and expansion of principle 4.
6 The Declaration of Independence stated as a self-evident fact - that all men are created equal.
Equality before the law means simply that. The problem with its enforcement has come with the treatment of minorities and crossing the culture gap. We are a nation of various minorities and violence proves counter-productive. To insure these rights, amendments to the Constitution were adopted in 1789.
That said, equal rights does not mean equal results. Equal rights simply levels the playing field. After that the path of one's boat is determined by a variety of attributes and luck. Once again we have strayed/morphed off the desired path and made government the vehicle by which we believe we become entitled to acquire or be given "equal things!"
7) A restatement and expansion of principle 6.
The Founders recognized a mandate of God to help the poor and underprivileged but that it should be done through what they termed 'calculated compassion.' Again Franklin pointed out that in far too many instances compassion simply proved counter-productive and resulted, for instance, in giving a drunk the means to increase his drunkenness, blunts the desire or necessity for work, smothers instinct to strive etc,.
As you read this, think, again, what Obama's guiding principles are. Take from the wealthy because their accomplishments are suspect. Increase dependency and handouts etc. Expand government so more party voter dependency is created.
8.Devoted to enumerating the many unalienable rights our Creator has provided for us.
All rights are founded in the protection of life.
9. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law.
The author provides examples of public and private duties provided man by our Creator ex., Honor the supremacy of the Creator and his laws, etc. Natural law constitutes eternal principles.
Again, the reader is reminded what sets our Republic apart is we are governed by people laws which protect us from those who govern. The government receives its rights from its citizens.
10. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people.
In other words, the ultimate authority resides in the people alone.
11.The majority of the people may alter or abolish a government which has become tyrannical.
12. The United States of America shall be a Republic.
The critical distinction between a Democracy and a Republic is that the former requires full participation of the masses and this has proven never to work over any extended period.
Thus, the Founders wanted Americans to be governed through representation, those who served at the pleasure of the citizens and for limited terms. We have run afoul of this guiding principle and have created a government which has become a revolving door favoring incumbents.
13. A constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers.
The Founders recognized man's frailties and distrusted extended power in the hands of the governing. We now have an arrogant president who has contempt for the governed and seeks to skirt the check and balance provisions of our Constitution. He overuses Executive Orders to accomplish his nefarious goals and appointments, to circumvent the Legislative Branch, to expand government and his use of the powers of an expanded government.
Again, think of the recent IRS revelations and the discriminatory impact it had in restricting fund raising efforts of those opposed to Obama. The selectivity of its impact is totally contrary to the principles of fair treatment under the law. Its use may well have determined the election results and for sure had a significant impact which was hidden from the voters.
14.Life and liberty are secure only so long as the right to property is secure.
An all powerful government that has the ability to tax the fruits of a man's labor and can crush one's freedom. Property rights are sacred.
The primary purpose of government is to protect property and the liberty of its citizens. Obama is of the view government should take from the haves and give to the have nots and, in many cases, the have nots have turned out to be labor.
Think of his actions in the case of GM.
Redistribution of wealth was thought unconstitutional until The Supreme Court, in 1936, in The Butler Case, arbitrarily expanded and distorted the meaning of the "general welfare" clause to permit distribution of federal bounties as a demonstration of "concern" for the poor and the needy.
15. The highest level of prosperity occurs when there is a free market economy and a minimum of government regulations.
The Founders were moved to set up a social structure based on natural law but what about in the matter of economics? Eventually the Founders came to realize the freedom to try, to buy, to sell to fail would lead to the greatest freedom and prosperity. Is it any wonder that by 1905, America had become the richest industrial nation in the world?
The introduction of fractional banking, an economy of debt instead of wealth has led us to a declining standard of living, high and intractable unemployment, an arrogant bureaucracy, red tape that restrains the entrepreneurial spirit and tax laws that are themselves a crime. Is this the America our Founders envisioned?
I challenge any fair minded person to concur!
16. The government should be separated into three branches - legislative, executive and judicial.
During the debates which led to our Constitution many proposals found support, ie. more than one executive etc. and the basic principles of sound constitutionalism were deemed unpopular at first. Many were the naysayers.
Even to this day we have the Soros' of the world who would prefer chaos rather than the rule of law in order to create their dream of a new order.
17. A system of checks and balances should be adopted to prevent the abuse of power.
Skousen writes: "Constitutional control in the hands of each department was [designed] to prevent usurpation of power by another department or abusive administration of the power to it." "Checks were designed to protect the "Will of the people, to promote Peaceful self-repair and to promote the blessings of tranquility."
Once again I beseech the reader to think of Obama and test his practices against this concept.
18.The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution.
This should be self-evident and the same applies to contracts. Even among honest men human memory is fallible. Did you know that Israel does not have a Constitution and that Bernie Marcus has expended millions trying to get Israel to draft one?
19.Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to government. All others being retained in the people.
States originally protected themselves against federal incursion because senators were appointed by their legislatures. The 17th Amendment changed that in 1913. Skousen believes the Founders would have frowned on this Amendment.
It is obvious states have become subsumed and citizens have had their freedoms diminished because they now are ruled by distance and when that happens indifference takes root etc. I also believed when states abdicate their responsibility they run the risk of losing their authority, ie. the Civil Rights Period in the South brought the Federal Government into many functions that were under state authority and control
20.Efficiency and dispatch require government to operate according to the will of the majority, but constitutional provisions must be made to protect the rights of the minority.
21. Strong local self-government is the keystone to preserving human freedom
As noted in 19 above, distance weakens local control, local decision impact and this, in turn, diminishes personal freedom.
The amoebic nature of the federal government and its all encompassing power ia a direct threat to freedom and this is why 'Obamscare' is scary! This president has brought more GDP under the "Big Tent" than any heretofore and it takes more taxes to support it and more taxes means less freedom. Obama knows what he is doing.
His past associations with radicals has led to his antipathy towards what he perceives is America's extended world reach, its intrusions into the arena of world affairs. He has an aversion for the history of former Colonial powers. Churchill's bust symbolized no less just as Robert E Lee's portrait in Savannah's City Hall stuck in our former mayor's craw!
I believe Obama is a not so subtle racist.
22. A free people should be governed by the law and not by the whims of men.
Run that one up The White House Flag Pole if you believe Obama offers a stable approach towards governance. For man to retain freedom it is incumbent that laws be stable and understandable. Again I remind you of the multi-thousand pages of Obama laws pertaining to governance of our health. Is this a road map for our freedom?
23. A free society cannot survive as a Republic without a broad program of general education.
Now we come to the guts of why we are failing as a Republic and why we run an increasing risk of being governed in ways detrimental to our freedom. A solid public education administered by equally solid and good 'local' school boards is essential.
Again, de Tocqueville was impressed by America's adherence and insistence upon public education which included the teaching of morality, politics and history. The right to vote is sacred but it places upon the individual the necessity of being informed and calls upon him to participate.
The quickest road to dictatorship, to the election of the unworthy is for the electorate to neither care nor take the time to inform themselves of the critical issues and to be able to prioritize them.
24. A free people will not survive unless they stay strong.
Here again, we have insurmountable historical evidence that a free people in a civilized society tend toward prosperity and prosperity makes citizens less vulnerable to the pernicious reach of oppressive, thuggery, heavy handed and stifling government.
Again, another reason why Obama favors a diminished American military presence. A disarmed America is no longer a threat to the world in his glaucomac eyes. Peace is the goal, strength is the means. We have come a long way from Washington's: " First in peace, first in war, first in the hearts of his countrymen."
Samuel Adams believed we had a duty to our Creator to preserve freedom and God's gift of unalienable rights and man could do so only by being strong. It was wrong and wicked for man to allow his freedom to languish through neglect.
25."Peace, Commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none."
These were Jefferson's words in is first inaugural address.
Washington also warned about the implications of playing favorites and the consequences of entanglements. Doing so could lead to strong foreign influence which was one of the most baneful foes of a Republic. He favored commerce, but was suspect of deep political connections.
The Founders struggled with efforts to reconcile "separatism" with "manifest destiny." Over time we have replaced "separatism" with "internationalism." The author attributes this to strong banking interests. Perhaps it was inevitable as we become a world peacemaker after entry into World War 2.
26.The core unit which determines the strength of any society is the family.
Therefore, the government should foster and protect its integrity. It must not interfere with legitimate family relations. I have written time and again our Republic will not survive a weakened family unit. The family unit is the foundation of our society, any society. Increasingly, our society is resting upon a fractured family unit. Children are being raised by one parent. This undercuts our children's security and their ability to compete.
Family authority is breaking down and juvenile crime is on the increase. Gangs supplant the family. Man has a natural needs for the comfort and support of others. These pernicious trends are neither what the Founders intended nor envisioned.
Parents have a responsibility to children and children have an equal responsibility to their parents. The family is meant to involve a trilateral structure. There are certain things a mature adult must/should know. Government has intruded and weakened the family unit with misplaced authority and roles. This has resulted in a very unhealthy environment and one not conducive to the protection and/or survival of societal freedom and prosperity.
27. The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest.
The Founders were raised in an age when debt was recognized for its ugly spectre. Frugality was a virtue.
American thought with respect to debt has come full circle.
Debt gives leverage and satisfies uncontrollable needs to have now that which cannot be deferred. It was deemed immoral for one administration to impose its debt upon another except in the most dire of circumstances. the Founders believed debt should be extinguished promptly.
Today we spend the next generations inheritance without thought. The only way to return to the Founder's formula is to re-embrace their wisdom and adhere to their fundamental principles which brought us untold prosperity and the blessings of a growing middle class. Can or will we?
The outlook becomes increasingly dark as we compound the debt problem and this president is the biggest offender in history.
28.The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race.
Certainly, until his election, Obama's wife expressed her displeasure and embarrassment about being an American. John Jay, of somewhat greater and deserved fame, considered America to be a Providential Blessing. Since his election the First Lady has advantaged herself and extended family with the largess provided from the public trough and staffed herself beyond any First Lady.
As for the President, he has slept and golfed while his fellow man has been attacked without resort to assistance (the lesson of Benghazi) in the interest if re=election, investigated his fellow citizens' right to protest (the IRS lesson) and comparably his Attorney General has tracked and intimidated reporters, without their knowledge, for seeking the legality of their government's actions (the AP story.)
Lest we forget about the lessons of 'Fast and Furious,' Obama's rush to judgement of the Boston arrest of a Harvard professor, the recent tragic bumbling of the background investigation of two Boston 'crackpots,' because those sworn to protect us are no longer able to think terrorists, the apologies offered by our president on behalf of a proud nation to radical Islamists, the fact that you did not make that the government did, Obama knows best which 'green endeavor' to support and thwart not the market and the list is endless.
'The Founders knew we were sailing into uncharted waters' according to Skousen. After examining every kind of political operation known to man they abstracted what they deemed, from history, was every lesson and precaution they could learn and crafted a document by which we live.
It is a very short bit of writing when compared to currents laws - The Affordable Health Act comes to mind.
I submit, whom would you rather follow? Our Founders or the likes of Obama? I rest my case!
(See 1 below)
---
Dick
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)1. What Triggered the IRS Targeting 'Admission' The surprising admission by a high-ranking Internal Revenue Service official that the agency targeted tea party and other conservative groups could be seen as a tactical move designed to stave off a deeper investigation of the scandal. Washington insiders said the Obama administration was engaged in a classic tactic called a “modified limited hangout” or MLH — a term that dates back to the Nixon presidency.
An MLH is a public relations or propaganda technique that involves the release of previously hidden information in hopes of ending a probe and preventing exposure of more important or damaging information. The idea is to admit to some wrongdoing, but not all, in hopes of deflating press and public demands for more investigations.
During a March 1973 discussion between President Nixon and his top advisers, Nixon outlined to John Dean a report that Dean would create, offering a misleading view of the White House staff's role in events surrounding the Watergate burglary. When Dean said, "It's a limited hangout," John Ehrlichman piped in: "It's a modified limited hangout."
The unfolding IRS scandal has all the earmarks of an MLH. In March 2010, the IRS began targeting tea party and other conservative groups for closer scrutiny, demanding paperwork and other materials from the groups that delayed their application for tax-exempt status. A congressional committee last year asked then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman about targeting allegations, but he told the committee the agency wasn't targeting conservative groups. He resigned in late 2012, and Steven Miller became acting IRS commissioner. Then in early May of this year, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration released a report confirming the targeting to congressional investigators, but not to the public.
Apparently fearing the release of the upcoming Inspector General’s report, IRS officials decided to engage in an MLH. On May 10, Lois Lerner, head of the IRS tax-exempt-status division, admitted that the targeting had been taking place, but asserted that it had not been centrally planned and was carried out by lower-level "front-line people" in the Cincinnati office. But the move backfired — the admission by Lerner only served to spark public outrage and encourage investigators to dig deeper.
And, powerful evidence suggests the IRS activities involved high-ranking IRS officials in D.C., and hundreds of conservative organizations — not ones simply with “tea party” or “patriots” in their organization names. On Tuesday, four days after Lerner's admission, respected elections attorney Cleta Mitchell came forward and claimed that the IRS scandal reaches to the White House. She said she also is aware of nearly 100 other conservative groups that were being targeted by Washington. "There were nearly 100 groups across the country that got the very egregious set of letters from the IRS that were almost identical and they came from offices all over the country, so I know of at least 85 to 90, maybe more, organizations," said Mitchell, who represents six groups that say they have been targeted. She added that she had two clients whose groups’ purpose was to lobby against Obamacare, and both received extra IRS scrutiny. Mitchell told Newsmax she doesn't believe the president or the White House was uninvolved in the IRS activities, as the administration has claimed. "They may try to say it was low-level people," she said. "It was not low-level people. They weren't in Cincinnati. It was being directed out of Washington, and I have them on record saying that. "We know the White House used the Department of Health and Human Services to try to silence critics about Obamacare. So if we know they used HHS, why wouldn't they also use the IRS or other federal agencies to try to silence political critics?"
The next day, Wednesday, May 15 — the day Commissioner Miller was forced to resign — the IRS reported that the Inspector General's office is launching a new investigation. Insiders say expect more MLHs from the Obama administration. 1a)Obama and the 'official truth' By Caroline B. Glick Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been sitting in a US federal prison in Texas since his photographed midnight arrest by half a dozen deputy sheriffs at his home in California for violating the terms of his parole.
As many reporters have noted, the parole violation in question would not generally lead to anything more than a court hearing. But in Nakoula's case, it led to a year in a federal penitentiary. Because he wasn't really arrested for violating the terms of his parole. Nakoula was arrested for producing an anti- Islam film that the Obama administration was falsely blaming for the al-Qaida assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi and the brutal murder of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on September 11, 2012. Obama and his associates falsely blamed Nakoula's film — and scapegoated Nakoula — for inciting the al-Qaida attack in Benghazi because they needed a fall guy to pin their cover-up of the actual circumstances of the premeditated, eminently foreseeable attack, which took place at the height of the presidential election campaign.
With the flood of scandals now inundating the White House, many are wondering if there is a connection between the cover-up of Benghazi, the IRS's prejudicial treatment of non-leftist nonprofit organizations and political donors, the Environmental Protection Agency's prejudicial treatment of non-liberal organizations, and the Justice Department's subpoenaing of phone records of up to a hundred reporters and editors from the Associated Press.
On the surface, they seem like unrelated events. But they are not. They expose the modus operandi of the Obama administration: To establish an "official truth" about all issues and events, and use the powers of the federal government to punish all those who question or expose the fraudulence of that "official truth." From the outset of Obama's tenure in office, his signature foreign policy has been his strategy of appeasing jihadist groups and regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran at the expense of US allies, including Israel, the Egyptian military, and longtime leaders like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.
The administration defended its strategy in various ways. It presented the assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs as the denouement of the US war on terror. By killing the al-Qaida chief, the administration claimed, it had effectively ended the problem of jihad, which it reduced to al-Qaida generally and its founder specifically.
Just as important, it has tried to hide the very existence of the jihadist threat. To this end, the administration purged all terms relevant to the discussion of jihadist Islam from the federal lexicon and fired officials who defied the language and subject ban. It has hidden the jihadist motive of terrorists and information relating to known jihadists from relevant governmental bodies. The Benghazi cover-up is the most blatant example of this policy of obfuscating and denying the truth.
But it is far from a unique occurrence. For instance, the administration has stubbornly denied that Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan's massacre of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood in Texas was a jihadist attack. And in the months preceding the Tsarnaev brother's bombing of the Boston Marathon, and in its immediate aftermath, the FBI did not share its long-held information about the older brother's jihadist activities with local law enforcement agencies.
To advance its "official truth," the administration leaked information to the media about top secret operations that advanced its official narrative. For instance, top administration officials leaked the story of the Stuxnet computer virus that compromised Iranian computers used by Iran's nuclear weapons program. These stories compromised ongoing US and Israeli intelligence operations. But they advanced the administration's foreign policy narrative.
Conversely, as the AP scandal shows, the administration went on fishing expeditions to root out those who leaked stories that harmed the administration's narrative that al-Qaida is a spent force. In May 2012, AP reported that the CIA had scuttled an al-Qaida plot in Yemen to bomb a US airliner. The story damaged the credibility of Obama's claim that al-Qaida was defeated, and challenged the wisdom of Obama's support for the al-Qaida-aligned antiregime protesters in Yemen that ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh in November 2011. Finally, the administration has promoted its policy by demonizing as extremists and bigoted every significant voice that called that policy into question.
For example, in his satirical speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month, Obama snidely — and libelously — accused Rep. Michele Bachmann of "book burning." Bachmann is an outspoken critic of Obama's policy of appeasing Islamists at the expense of America's allies. Bachmann is also the chairwoman of the House of Representative's Tea Party caucus. And demonizing her is just one instance of what has emerged as the administration's tool of choice in its bid to marginalize its opponents. This practice arguably began during Obama's 2008 presidential campaign when then-senator Obama referred to his opponents as "bitter" souls who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to those who aren't like them." In the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, Obama and his supportive media characterized the grassroots Tea Party movement for limited government as racist, selfish, extremist and uncaring.
And now we have learned that beginning in March 2010, the Internal Revenue Service instituted what can only be considered a systemic policy of discriminating against nonprofit groups dedicated to fighting Obama's domestic agenda. The IRS demanded information about the groups' donors, worldviews, reading materials and social networking accounts, and personal information about its membership and leaders that it had no right to receive. And according to USA Today, it held up approval of nonprofit status for 27 months for all groups related to the Tea Party movement. Some 500 organizations were victimized by this abuse of power. We also learned this week that the IRS leaked information about donors to at least one nonprofit group that opposes homosexual marriage to a group that supports homosexual marriage.
The latter group was led by one of Obama's reelection campaign's co-chairman. We learned that the IRS audited a university professor who wrote newspaper articles critical of fake Catholic groups that supported Obama's pro-abortion policies. All of this aligns seamlessly with the Obama administration's demonization of conservative donors like the Koch brothers, and other stories of persecution of conservative donors that have come out over the past several years. Last July, The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel reported that after the Obama campaign besmirched as "less-thank reputable" eight businessmen who supported political action committees associated with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, one of the donors, Frank VanderSloot, found himself subjected to an IRS audit and a Labor Department investigation.inally there is the administration's discriminatory treatment of pro-Israel organizations.
A day after Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS department overseeing nonprofit groups, admitted the IRS had been discriminating against groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement, we were reminded of the appalling treatment that Z Street, a new pro-Israel organization that opposes Obama's policy toward Israel, received at the hands of the IRS. Z Street was founded in 2009 and applied for nonprofit status in December 2009. In 2010, Z Street filed a lawsuit in federal court against the IRS.
According to court documents, the suit was filed after Z Street was informed by an IRS spokesperson that consideration of its application was being delayed, and could be denied because the IRS has a special policy for dealing with nonprofit applications submitted by groups related to Israel. According to Z Street's court filings, the IRS official said that all Israel-related organizations are assigned to "a special unit in the DC office to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the administration's public policies."
Around the same time that Z Street's application for nonprofit status hit a brick wall of discriminatory treatment, Commentary magazine, also a nonprofit organization, received a letter from the IRS threatening to revoke its nonprofit status because in 2008 the publication posted the transcript of a speech then Sen. Joseph Lieberman gave at a Commentary dinner in which he endorsed Sen. John McCain for president.
As John Podhoretz, Commentary's editor, wrote last week, to disprove a false charge, the magazine had to spend tens of thousands of dollars and waste "dozens upon dozens" of work hours copying two million pages of articles posted on the magazine's website in 2008 to prove that Lieberman's speech was a tiny fraction of the magazine's overall output.
Then, too, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a nonprofit where I work as the director of the Israel Security Project, was recently subjected to an IRS audit — which it also passed with flying colors. The Freedom Center's work spans the spectrum from domestic policy to foreign policy, and like Z Street and Commentary, is generally critical of the Obama administration's policy toward Israel.
Finally, there is the administration's obsessive targeting of billionaire donor Sheldon Adelson. During the 2012 presidential election, Obama's top political adviser David Axelrod wrote a letter to Antonio Miguel, a Socialist member of the Spanish parliament, attacking Adelson as "greedy." Miguel leaked the letter to the media while Adelson was in Spain promoting his Las Vegas Sands casino corporation's plans to build Eurovegas, a casino in Madrid. Axelrod later sent his letter to Obama supporters in an email from the Obama presidential campaign.
Adelson is best known for his support for the US-Israel alliance, and his friendship with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. By calling Adelson "greedy," Axelrod was channeling age-old anti- Semitic imagery, and by inference engaging in it, in his assault against Adelson. In the letter in question, Adelson was the subject of this ad hominem assault due to his support for Romney in the 2012 elections. The Tea Party movement has to date limited its scope to domestic policy — challenging the growth of the federal government on a host of issues. For its part, still smarting from the unpopularity of former president George W. Bush's campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Republican Party has yet to enunciate a clear foreign policy.
The closest thing to a systematic rebuke of the Obama administration's signature foreign policy of courting Islamist movements and regimes and treating US allies in the region with hostility are organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Z Street and Commentary and wealthy donors like Adelson. Their stalwart and articulate support for a strong US alliance with Israel, and a strong and vibrant Israel, are the only coherent challenge to Obama's pro-Islamist foreign policy. By targeting them, the Obama administration completes the circle of an overall modus operandi of punishing those who oppose and expose the failures of his policies — domestic and foreign.
The underlying theme that connects Benghazi to the Tea Party, to the subpoenaing of AP phone records, to Z Street, to Nakoula is that they all have challenged the administration's "official truth." One can only hope that Obama's thuggish creation and corrupt defense of his "official truth" will anger, disgust — and frighten — all Americans.usible
The effect is hard to tell since most black voters will call it all racially motivated.
Spanish voters will feel otherwise because they do not have the same blind allegiance as black Americans and will not feel the charges are against them.
Finally, I suspect most white voters, who remain enthralled with Obama, will circle the wagons and try and defend him in a variety of ways because they cannot bring themselves to be objective and to look themselves in the mirror and admit they were duped and suckered. The key to Obama's current future lies with the media and press and though they now smell blood they are not likely to jeopardize their access or rid themselves of their leg tingles.
History will show him to be what I have believed all along - a tragic mistake, an incompetent mistake and a lying mistake. (See 1 and 1a below.)
---
Now for an attempt at reviewing: " The Five Thousand Year Leap - Twenty-Eight Great Ideas That Are Changing the World" by W. Cleon Skousen(June 1981)
Why is a book published in 1981 being reviewed now? Why did the New York Times decide to try to trash the ideas in the book and the author himself? Why was the book reissued and become a national bestseller under the new name: The 5,000 Year Leap – Principles of Freedom - A Miracle that Changed the World?
W. Cleon Skousen was a popular author, speaker and teacher across North America, and in more than 60 countries worldwide. He was a student of history and a scholar of law, specializing in the principles of Freedom, The U.S. Constitution, economics, and ancient history and scriptures. He was invited to write a new constitution for Canada and the proposed United States of Latin America, and he published a model constitution that could be adopted by nations everywhere. He served 16 years in the FBI,
four years as Chief of Police in Salt Lake City, and ten years as a university professor. He was a prolific writer and produced three national best sellers, The Naked Communist, The Naked Capitalist, and The Five Thousand Year Leap. Eight of his books were used as college texts, and several were translated and published in other countries.
He was admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia and before the District Court of
Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.
His seminars on the Constitution have been taught to millions across the U.S. Among his students were dozens of U.S. Senators and Representatives, two Supreme Court justices, and several candidates for President.
He believed knowledge and understanding were key to maintaining a free country, and spent his entire adult life opening up complex issues for deeper understanding by students and audiences all around the world.
And so it is obvious why the NY Times had to try to diminish his ideas that were republicised by Glenn Beck, who attributed much of his own re-enlightenment to this text originally published in 1981. The reemergence of Skousen’s work and support by Tea Party advocates then made it a national bestseller.
The NY Times naturally found Skousen’s return to the Constitution’s founding principles particularly troubling. So they proceeded to write scathing criticisms of Skousen as a far right extremist, and even tried to bring in his Mormon faith as evidence he was out of the mainstream.
Yet His credentials obviously belie those NY Times criticisms and, typical of when liberal thinking can’t rebut the content, they resorted to personal attacks.
What the NY Times can’t stand is the public better understanding what made this country the success that it is.
And what they can’t abide is anyone questioning the new direction that liberals want to take us in, using made up concepts of “fairness” and “equal outcomes” to expand the power of the federal government to run people’s lives.
So for the readers of this review to begin to understand what is at stake, here are the 28 principles that Skousen perceived that America’s founding fathers energized. These were what the author believed were so different from the prior centuries’ and millennial political wisdom on how a society should be governed.
The author begins with an introduction about the settlement at Jamestown, and that it represented a new beginning for man kind culminating in our Constitution and Republic. Jamestown was different because communal economics was tried by these European immigrants but they found out they were worse than Plato described. Consequently they began to develop a system of free enterprise principles which were later defined and refined in Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations."
Skousen uses the rest of this marvelous treatise to list and discuss the 28 great ideas that have/are changed/changing the world and urges we return to the basics if we are to retain our Republic, for whenever we stray from their message we run afoul of natural law and God's intent. Structuring a Government with all the Power in the People: What a novel concept.
The intent was to govern in the center by people's law and avoid Ruler's Law (Tyranny) and No Law (Anarchy.)
Our founders noted the similarities between Anglo-Saxon Common Law and the People's Law of Ancient Israel. The genius of our Founders was they devised a three headed eagle connected by one neck. The three branches were endowed with separate powers but each was co-ordinated with the other and could not function independently of the other. The Executive Branch was deemed the problem solving one while the Judicial was deemed the conservation wing, ie protecting the nation's resources and the people's freedom.
This is why the recent revelations of Obama's IRS machinations is so disturbing, disheartening and totally foreign to what our Founders intended.
Principles:
1. The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law.
Because man is endowed with the gift of reason and a soul it was deemed that man should adhere to God's law or virtue and all of laws should be measured against God's Law. Examples would be unalienable rights, duties and responsibilities, Habeas Corpus, limited government, checks and balances, no taxation without representation etc. Why? Because a free man was a productive man as proven by our Republic's great contributions to man kind.
2.A free people cannot survive under a Republican Constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong.
Skousen discusses how to retain the essential ingredient for man's freedom "virtue," in the 3rd principle. 3. The most promising method of securing a virtuous and morally stable people is to elect virtuous leaders. Once again reflect upon the current president, how he has conducted himself, his appointments and their actions and, again, any thinking, caring person has to be dispirited.
The Founders spoke often about making public service an honor rather than a means to a profit which has become so commonplace in today's D.C. Move to Washington, work your way up the ladder and never leave as you gain more and more power and more and more wealth. Ben Franklin 'foresaw the possibility that profit in public office could become the means by which an American monarchy could eventually be established.' How sad indeed as it is coming to pass. Politics has proven to be the road to fortunes for so many.
4.Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained.
de Toqueville discovered the importance of religion when he came to America and considered it the glue to our uniqueness and greatness. Franklin believed a Creator existed and mankind should recognize and worship this. He further believed the Creator revealed a moral code of behaviour, that mankind was responsible for the way his behaviour was used to treat his fellow person.
These tenets are found throughout the Founder's writings and the remarkable thing they did was their campaign for equality of all religions. Even atheists were allowed to believe as they wish. As Americans becomes progressive and less inclined toward religion, less moral, less caring about those who adhere to a religious and moral code and orientation we again cannot help but be drawn back to the consequences and revelations of Benghazi, the IRS, the AP affair.
No effort made to save fellow citizens, attacks on citizens who are of a different mind set and attacks on a free press to stultify probing of government. Religious principles under-gird good government.
5. A restatement and expansion of principle 4.
6 The Declaration of Independence stated as a self-evident fact - that all men are created equal.
Equality before the law means simply that. The problem with its enforcement has come with the treatment of minorities and crossing the culture gap. We are a nation of various minorities and violence proves counter-productive. To insure these rights, amendments to the Constitution were adopted in 1789.
That said, equal rights does not mean equal results. Equal rights simply levels the playing field. After that the path of one's boat is determined by a variety of attributes and luck. Once again we have strayed/morphed off the desired path and made government the vehicle by which we believe we become entitled to acquire or be given "equal things!"
7) A restatement and expansion of principle 6.
The Founders recognized a mandate of God to help the poor and underprivileged but that it should be done through what they termed 'calculated compassion.' Again Franklin pointed out that in far too many instances compassion simply proved counter-productive and resulted, for instance, in giving a drunk the means to increase his drunkenness, blunts the desire or necessity for work, smothers instinct to strive etc,.
As you read this, think, again, what Obama's guiding principles are. Take from the wealthy because their accomplishments are suspect. Increase dependency and handouts etc. Expand government so more party voter dependency is created.
8.Devoted to enumerating the many unalienable rights our Creator has provided for us.
All rights are founded in the protection of life.
9. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law.
The author provides examples of public and private duties provided man by our Creator ex., Honor the supremacy of the Creator and his laws, etc. Natural law constitutes eternal principles.
Again, the reader is reminded what sets our Republic apart is we are governed by people laws which protect us from those who govern. The government receives its rights from its citizens.
10. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people.
In other words, the ultimate authority resides in the people alone.
11.The majority of the people may alter or abolish a government which has become tyrannical.
12. The United States of America shall be a Republic.
The critical distinction between a Democracy and a Republic is that the former requires full participation of the masses and this has proven never to work over any extended period.
Thus, the Founders wanted Americans to be governed through representation, those who served at the pleasure of the citizens and for limited terms. We have run afoul of this guiding principle and have created a government which has become a revolving door favoring incumbents.
13. A constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers.
The Founders recognized man's frailties and distrusted extended power in the hands of the governing. We now have an arrogant president who has contempt for the governed and seeks to skirt the check and balance provisions of our Constitution. He overuses Executive Orders to accomplish his nefarious goals and appointments, to circumvent the Legislative Branch, to expand government and his use of the powers of an expanded government.
Again, think of the recent IRS revelations and the discriminatory impact it had in restricting fund raising efforts of those opposed to Obama. The selectivity of its impact is totally contrary to the principles of fair treatment under the law. Its use may well have determined the election results and for sure had a significant impact which was hidden from the voters.
14.Life and liberty are secure only so long as the right to property is secure.
An all powerful government that has the ability to tax the fruits of a man's labor and can crush one's freedom. Property rights are sacred.
The primary purpose of government is to protect property and the liberty of its citizens. Obama is of the view government should take from the haves and give to the have nots and, in many cases, the have nots have turned out to be labor.
Think of his actions in the case of GM.
Redistribution of wealth was thought unconstitutional until The Supreme Court, in 1936, in The Butler Case, arbitrarily expanded and distorted the meaning of the "general welfare" clause to permit distribution of federal bounties as a demonstration of "concern" for the poor and the needy.
15. The highest level of prosperity occurs when there is a free market economy and a minimum of government regulations.
The Founders were moved to set up a social structure based on natural law but what about in the matter of economics? Eventually the Founders came to realize the freedom to try, to buy, to sell to fail would lead to the greatest freedom and prosperity. Is it any wonder that by 1905, America had become the richest industrial nation in the world?
The introduction of fractional banking, an economy of debt instead of wealth has led us to a declining standard of living, high and intractable unemployment, an arrogant bureaucracy, red tape that restrains the entrepreneurial spirit and tax laws that are themselves a crime. Is this the America our Founders envisioned?
I challenge any fair minded person to concur!
16. The government should be separated into three branches - legislative, executive and judicial.
During the debates which led to our Constitution many proposals found support, ie. more than one executive etc. and the basic principles of sound constitutionalism were deemed unpopular at first. Many were the naysayers.
Even to this day we have the Soros' of the world who would prefer chaos rather than the rule of law in order to create their dream of a new order.
17. A system of checks and balances should be adopted to prevent the abuse of power.
Skousen writes: "Constitutional control in the hands of each department was [designed] to prevent usurpation of power by another department or abusive administration of the power to it." "Checks were designed to protect the "Will of the people, to promote Peaceful self-repair and to promote the blessings of tranquility."
Once again I beseech the reader to think of Obama and test his practices against this concept.
18.The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution.
This should be self-evident and the same applies to contracts. Even among honest men human memory is fallible. Did you know that Israel does not have a Constitution and that Bernie Marcus has expended millions trying to get Israel to draft one?
19.Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to government. All others being retained in the people.
States originally protected themselves against federal incursion because senators were appointed by their legislatures. The 17th Amendment changed that in 1913. Skousen believes the Founders would have frowned on this Amendment.
It is obvious states have become subsumed and citizens have had their freedoms diminished because they now are ruled by distance and when that happens indifference takes root etc. I also believed when states abdicate their responsibility they run the risk of losing their authority, ie. the Civil Rights Period in the South brought the Federal Government into many functions that were under state authority and control
20.Efficiency and dispatch require government to operate according to the will of the majority, but constitutional provisions must be made to protect the rights of the minority.
21. Strong local self-government is the keystone to preserving human freedom
As noted in 19 above, distance weakens local control, local decision impact and this, in turn, diminishes personal freedom.
The amoebic nature of the federal government and its all encompassing power ia a direct threat to freedom and this is why 'Obamscare' is scary! This president has brought more GDP under the "Big Tent" than any heretofore and it takes more taxes to support it and more taxes means less freedom. Obama knows what he is doing.
His past associations with radicals has led to his antipathy towards what he perceives is America's extended world reach, its intrusions into the arena of world affairs. He has an aversion for the history of former Colonial powers. Churchill's bust symbolized no less just as Robert E Lee's portrait in Savannah's City Hall stuck in our former mayor's craw!
I believe Obama is a not so subtle racist.
22. A free people should be governed by the law and not by the whims of men.
Run that one up The White House Flag Pole if you believe Obama offers a stable approach towards governance. For man to retain freedom it is incumbent that laws be stable and understandable. Again I remind you of the multi-thousand pages of Obama laws pertaining to governance of our health. Is this a road map for our freedom?
23. A free society cannot survive as a Republic without a broad program of general education.
Now we come to the guts of why we are failing as a Republic and why we run an increasing risk of being governed in ways detrimental to our freedom. A solid public education administered by equally solid and good 'local' school boards is essential.
Again, de Tocqueville was impressed by America's adherence and insistence upon public education which included the teaching of morality, politics and history. The right to vote is sacred but it places upon the individual the necessity of being informed and calls upon him to participate.
The quickest road to dictatorship, to the election of the unworthy is for the electorate to neither care nor take the time to inform themselves of the critical issues and to be able to prioritize them.
24. A free people will not survive unless they stay strong.
Here again, we have insurmountable historical evidence that a free people in a civilized society tend toward prosperity and prosperity makes citizens less vulnerable to the pernicious reach of oppressive, thuggery, heavy handed and stifling government.
Again, another reason why Obama favors a diminished American military presence. A disarmed America is no longer a threat to the world in his glaucomac eyes. Peace is the goal, strength is the means. We have come a long way from Washington's: " First in peace, first in war, first in the hearts of his countrymen."
Samuel Adams believed we had a duty to our Creator to preserve freedom and God's gift of unalienable rights and man could do so only by being strong. It was wrong and wicked for man to allow his freedom to languish through neglect.
25."Peace, Commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none."
These were Jefferson's words in is first inaugural address.
Washington also warned about the implications of playing favorites and the consequences of entanglements. Doing so could lead to strong foreign influence which was one of the most baneful foes of a Republic. He favored commerce, but was suspect of deep political connections.
The Founders struggled with efforts to reconcile "separatism" with "manifest destiny." Over time we have replaced "separatism" with "internationalism." The author attributes this to strong banking interests. Perhaps it was inevitable as we become a world peacemaker after entry into World War 2.
26.The core unit which determines the strength of any society is the family.
Therefore, the government should foster and protect its integrity. It must not interfere with legitimate family relations. I have written time and again our Republic will not survive a weakened family unit. The family unit is the foundation of our society, any society. Increasingly, our society is resting upon a fractured family unit. Children are being raised by one parent. This undercuts our children's security and their ability to compete.
Family authority is breaking down and juvenile crime is on the increase. Gangs supplant the family. Man has a natural needs for the comfort and support of others. These pernicious trends are neither what the Founders intended nor envisioned.
Parents have a responsibility to children and children have an equal responsibility to their parents. The family is meant to involve a trilateral structure. There are certain things a mature adult must/should know. Government has intruded and weakened the family unit with misplaced authority and roles. This has resulted in a very unhealthy environment and one not conducive to the protection and/or survival of societal freedom and prosperity.
27. The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest.
The Founders were raised in an age when debt was recognized for its ugly spectre. Frugality was a virtue.
American thought with respect to debt has come full circle.
Debt gives leverage and satisfies uncontrollable needs to have now that which cannot be deferred. It was deemed immoral for one administration to impose its debt upon another except in the most dire of circumstances. the Founders believed debt should be extinguished promptly.
Today we spend the next generations inheritance without thought. The only way to return to the Founder's formula is to re-embrace their wisdom and adhere to their fundamental principles which brought us untold prosperity and the blessings of a growing middle class. Can or will we?
The outlook becomes increasingly dark as we compound the debt problem and this president is the biggest offender in history.
28.The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race.
Certainly, until his election, Obama's wife expressed her displeasure and embarrassment about being an American. John Jay, of somewhat greater and deserved fame, considered America to be a Providential Blessing. Since his election the First Lady has advantaged herself and extended family with the largess provided from the public trough and staffed herself beyond any First Lady.
As for the President, he has slept and golfed while his fellow man has been attacked without resort to assistance (the lesson of Benghazi) in the interest if re=election, investigated his fellow citizens' right to protest (the IRS lesson) and comparably his Attorney General has tracked and intimidated reporters, without their knowledge, for seeking the legality of their government's actions (the AP story.)
Lest we forget about the lessons of 'Fast and Furious,' Obama's rush to judgement of the Boston arrest of a Harvard professor, the recent tragic bumbling of the background investigation of two Boston 'crackpots,' because those sworn to protect us are no longer able to think terrorists, the apologies offered by our president on behalf of a proud nation to radical Islamists, the fact that you did not make that the government did, Obama knows best which 'green endeavor' to support and thwart not the market and the list is endless.
'The Founders knew we were sailing into uncharted waters' according to Skousen. After examining every kind of political operation known to man they abstracted what they deemed, from history, was every lesson and precaution they could learn and crafted a document by which we live.
It is a very short bit of writing when compared to currents laws - The Affordable Health Act comes to mind.
I submit, whom would you rather follow? Our Founders or Obama? I rest my case!
1a)1. What Triggered the IRS Targeting 'Admission' The surprising admission by a high-ranking Internal Revenue Service official that the agency targeted tea party and other conservative groups could be seen as a tactical move designed to stave off a deeper investigation of the scandal. Washington insiders said the Obama administration was engaged in a classic tactic called a “modified limited hangout” or MLH — a term that dates back to the Nixon presidency.
An MLH is a public relations or propaganda technique that involves the release of previously hidden information in hopes of ending a probe and preventing exposure of more important or damaging information. The idea is to admit to some wrongdoing, but not all, in hopes of deflating press and public demands for more investigations.
During a March 1973 discussion between President Nixon and his top advisers, Nixon outlined to John Dean a report that Dean would create, offering a misleading view of the White House staff's role in events surrounding the Watergate burglary. When Dean said, "It's a limited hangout," John Ehrlichman piped in: "It's a modified limited hangout."
The unfolding IRS scandal has all the earmarks of an MLH. In March 2010, the IRS began targeting tea party and other conservative groups for closer scrutiny, demanding paperwork and other materials from the groups that delayed their application for tax-exempt status. A congressional committee last year asked then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman about targeting allegations, but he told the committee the agency wasn't targeting conservative groups. He resigned in late 2012, and Steven Miller became acting IRS commissioner. Then in early May of this year, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration released a report confirming the targeting to congressional investigators, but not to the public.
Apparently fearing the release of the upcoming Inspector General’s report, IRS officials decided to engage in an MLH. On May 10, Lois Lerner, head of the IRS tax-exempt-status division, admitted that the targeting had been taking place, but asserted that it had not been centrally planned and was carried out by lower-level "front-line people" in the Cincinnati office. But the move backfired — the admission by Lerner only served to spark public outrage and encourage investigators to dig deeper.
And, powerful evidence suggests the IRS activities involved high-ranking IRS officials in D.C., and hundreds of conservative organizations — not ones simply with “tea party” or “patriots” in their organization names. On Tuesday, four days after Lerner's admission, respected elections attorney Cleta Mitchell came forward and claimed that the IRS scandal reaches to the White House. She said she also is aware of nearly 100 other conservative groups that were being targeted by Washington. "There were nearly 100 groups across the country that got the very egregious set of letters from the IRS that were almost identical and they came from offices all over the country, so I know of at least 85 to 90, maybe more, organizations," said Mitchell, who represents six groups that say they have been targeted. She added that she had two clients whose groups’ purpose was to lobby against Obamacare, and both received extra IRS scrutiny. Mitchell told Newsmax she doesn't believe the president or the White House was uninvolved in the IRS activities, as the administration has claimed. "They may try to say it was low-level people," she said. "It was not low-level people. They weren't in Cincinnati. It was being directed out of Washington, and I have them on record saying that. "We know the White House used the Department of Health and Human Services to try to silence critics about Obamacare. So if we know they used HHS, why wouldn't they also use the IRS or other federal agencies to try to silence political critics?"
The next day, Wednesday, May 15 — the day Commissioner Miller was forced to resign — the IRS reported that the Inspector General's office is launching a new investigation. Insiders say expect more MLHs from the Obama administration. 1a)Obama and the 'official truth' By Caroline B. Glick Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been sitting in a US federal prison in Texas since his photographed midnight arrest by half a dozen deputy sheriffs at his home in California for violating the terms of his parole.
As many reporters have noted, the parole violation in question would not generally lead to anything more than a court hearing. But in Nakoula's case, it led to a year in a federal penitentiary. Because he wasn't really arrested for violating the terms of his parole. Nakoula was arrested for producing an anti- Islam film that the Obama administration was falsely blaming for the al-Qaida assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi and the brutal murder of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on September 11, 2012. Obama and his associates falsely blamed Nakoula's film — and scapegoated Nakoula — for inciting the al-Qaida attack in Benghazi because they needed a fall guy to pin their cover-up of the actual circumstances of the premeditated, eminently foreseeable attack, which took place at the height of the presidential election campaign.
With the flood of scandals now inundating the White House, many are wondering if there is a connection between the cover-up of Benghazi, the IRS's prejudicial treatment of non-leftist nonprofit organizations and political donors, the Environmental Protection Agency's prejudicial treatment of non-liberal organizations, and the Justice Department's subpoenaing of phone records of up to a hundred reporters and editors from the Associated Press.
On the surface, they seem like unrelated events. But they are not. They expose the modus operandi of the Obama administration: To establish an "official truth" about all issues and events, and use the powers of the federal government to punish all those who question or expose the fraudulence of that "official truth." From the outset of Obama's tenure in office, his signature foreign policy has been his strategy of appeasing jihadist groups and regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran at the expense of US allies, including Israel, the Egyptian military, and longtime leaders like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.
The administration defended its strategy in various ways. It presented the assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs as the denouement of the US war on terror. By killing the al-Qaida chief, the administration claimed, it had effectively ended the problem of jihad, which it reduced to al-Qaida generally and its founder specifically.
Just as important, it has tried to hide the very existence of the jihadist threat. To this end, the administration purged all terms relevant to the discussion of jihadist Islam from the federal lexicon and fired officials who defied the language and subject ban. It has hidden the jihadist motive of terrorists and information relating to known jihadists from relevant governmental bodies. The Benghazi cover-up is the most blatant example of this policy of obfuscating and denying the truth.
But it is far from a unique occurrence. For instance, the administration has stubbornly denied that Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan's massacre of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood in Texas was a jihadist attack. And in the months preceding the Tsarnaev brother's bombing of the Boston Marathon, and in its immediate aftermath, the FBI did not share its long-held information about the older brother's jihadist activities with local law enforcement agencies.
To advance its "official truth," the administration leaked information to the media about top secret operations that advanced its official narrative. For instance, top administration officials leaked the story of the Stuxnet computer virus that compromised Iranian computers used by Iran's nuclear weapons program. These stories compromised ongoing US and Israeli intelligence operations. But they advanced the administration's foreign policy narrative.
Conversely, as the AP scandal shows, the administration went on fishing expeditions to root out those who leaked stories that harmed the administration's narrative that al-Qaida is a spent force. In May 2012, AP reported that the CIA had scuttled an al-Qaida plot in Yemen to bomb a US airliner. The story damaged the credibility of Obama's claim that al-Qaida was defeated, and challenged the wisdom of Obama's support for the al-Qaida-aligned antiregime protesters in Yemen that ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh in November 2011. Finally, the administration has promoted its policy by demonizing as extremists and bigoted every significant voice that called that policy into question.
For example, in his satirical speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month, Obama snidely — and libelously — accused Rep. Michele Bachmann of "book burning." Bachmann is an outspoken critic of Obama's policy of appeasing Islamists at the expense of America's allies. Bachmann is also the chairwoman of the House of Representative's Tea Party caucus. And demonizing her is just one instance of what has emerged as the administration's tool of choice in its bid to marginalize its opponents. This practice arguably began during Obama's 2008 presidential campaign when then-senator Obama referred to his opponents as "bitter" souls who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to those who aren't like them." In the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, Obama and his supportive media characterized the grassroots Tea Party movement for limited government as racist, selfish, extremist and uncaring.
And now we have learned that beginning in March 2010, the Internal Revenue Service instituted what can only be considered a systemic policy of discriminating against nonprofit groups dedicated to fighting Obama's domestic agenda. The IRS demanded information about the groups' donors, worldviews, reading materials and social networking accounts, and personal information about its membership and leaders that it had no right to receive. And according to USA Today, it held up approval of nonprofit status for 27 months for all groups related to the Tea Party movement. Some 500 organizations were victimized by this abuse of power. We also learned this week that the IRS leaked information about donors to at least one nonprofit group that opposes homosexual marriage to a group that supports homosexual marriage.
The latter group was led by one of Obama's reelection campaign's co-chairman. We learned that the IRS audited a university professor who wrote newspaper articles critical of fake Catholic groups that supported Obama's pro-abortion policies. All of this aligns seamlessly with the Obama administration's demonization of conservative donors like the Koch brothers, and other stories of persecution of conservative donors that have come out over the past several years. Last July, The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel reported that after the Obama campaign besmirched as "less-thank reputable" eight businessmen who supported political action committees associated with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, one of the donors, Frank VanderSloot, found himself subjected to an IRS audit and a Labor Department investigation.inally there is the administration's discriminatory treatment of pro-Israel organizations.
A day after Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS department overseeing nonprofit groups, admitted the IRS had been discriminating against groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement, we were reminded of the appalling treatment that Z Street, a new pro-Israel organization that opposes Obama's policy toward Israel, received at the hands of the IRS. Z Street was founded in 2009 and applied for nonprofit status in December 2009. In 2010, Z Street filed a lawsuit in federal court against the IRS.
According to court documents, the suit was filed after Z Street was informed by an IRS spokesperson that consideration of its application was being delayed, and could be denied because the IRS has a special policy for dealing with nonprofit applications submitted by groups related to Israel. According to Z Street's court filings, the IRS official said that all Israel-related organizations are assigned to "a special unit in the DC office to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the administration's public policies."
Around the same time that Z Street's application for nonprofit status hit a brick wall of discriminatory treatment, Commentary magazine, also a nonprofit organization, received a letter from the IRS threatening to revoke its nonprofit status because in 2008 the publication posted the transcript of a speech then Sen. Joseph Lieberman gave at a Commentary dinner in which he endorsed Sen. John McCain for president.
As John Podhoretz, Commentary's editor, wrote last week, to disprove a false charge, the magazine had to spend tens of thousands of dollars and waste "dozens upon dozens" of work hours copying two million pages of articles posted on the magazine's website in 2008 to prove that Lieberman's speech was a tiny fraction of the magazine's overall output.
Then, too, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a nonprofit where I work as the director of the Israel Security Project, was recently subjected to an IRS audit — which it also passed with flying colors. The Freedom Center's work spans the spectrum from domestic policy to foreign policy, and like Z Street and Commentary, is generally critical of the Obama administration's policy toward Israel.
Finally, there is the administration's obsessive targeting of billionaire donor Sheldon Adelson. During the 2012 presidential election, Obama's top political adviser David Axelrod wrote a letter to Antonio Miguel, a Socialist member of the Spanish parliament, attacking Adelson as "greedy." Miguel leaked the letter to the media while Adelson was in Spain promoting his Las Vegas Sands casino corporation's plans to build Eurovegas, a casino in Madrid. Axelrod later sent his letter to Obama supporters in an email from the Obama presidential campaign.
Adelson is best known for his support for the US-Israel alliance, and his friendship with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. By calling Adelson "greedy," Axelrod was channeling age-old anti- Semitic imagery, and by inference engaging in it, in his assault against Adelson. In the letter in question, Adelson was the subject of this ad hominem assault due to his support for Romney in the 2012 elections. The Tea Party movement has to date limited its scope to domestic policy — challenging the growth of the federal government on a host of issues. For its part, still smarting from the unpopularity of former president George W. Bush's campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Republican Party has yet to enunciate a clear foreign policy.
The closest thing to a systematic rebuke of the Obama administration's signature foreign policy of courting Islamist movements and regimes and treating US allies in the region with hostility are organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Z Street and Commentary and wealthy donors like Adelson. Their stalwart and articulate support for a strong US alliance with Israel, and a strong and vibrant Israel, are the only coherent challenge to Obama's pro-Islamist foreign policy. By targeting them, the Obama administration completes the circle of an overall modus operandi of punishing those who oppose and expose the failures of his policies — domestic and foreign.
The underlying theme that connects Benghazi to the Tea Party, to the subpoenaing of AP phone records, to Z Street, to Nakoula is that they all have challenged the administration's "official truth." One can only hope that Obama's thuggish creation and corrupt defense of his "official truth" will anger, disgust — and frighten — all Americans.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment